HR, Purpose and Thriving

What is purpose and what is thriving? Do they matter? Why do they matter? What is role of HR? And other questions I’ve been asking myself lately…

HR is my second career. Before, I would join many other employees venting frustrations about “HR” getting our pay wrong, the cumbersome forms and the performance management "improvements" of changing ratings from a 4 box system to a 27 box system. But I loved helping our new employees learn and grow. So, at some point I decided to study how I could do that better and then I ended up in HR, starting off as a trainer. If you can’t beat them, join them.

HR has evolved in waves overtime. Nick Dalton explains the past waves are paternalism, power, process, profit and people focus. In the article on waves, Nick Dalton explains we’re now approaching a paradox wave with hope that we will shift to one where we think more about our planet.

I think I joined HR at a time where the profession was in full ‘profit’ mode, thinking about how we get our workforce as productive as possible. If that occasionally meant being ‘nice’ to employees, providing it served the business, that was okay but not necessarily the purpose behind any new 'perks'. I read things like RIP Annual Engagement Surveys from Disruptive HR , which talks about how organisations listen to thousands of their customers, monitor their habits daily, but many only listen to their employees through a survey once a year, so we don’t have insight on how they can be more productive.

The pandemic cemented a shift to a focus on the people wave (with some paternalistic nostalgia thrown in). As a profession we generated a flurry of wellbeing toolkits to help our employees at least survive, if not thrive. Zoom sessions on mindfulness went in the diary and we were less fussed about productivity for a while. In recovering and renewing from a changed world in to the hybrid era, we remembered productivity was also important and the consulting industry started to survey the C-suite and generate ‘insight’ on what the perfect hybrid working model might look like. The ‘studies’ into productivity continue with some notes thrown into thought papers that there might be employee perks too, but many of them are still wrestling with the idea that employees’ lives are as important as productivity. There are some exceptions and examples of companies caring about both, that the folks at Corporate Rebels capture in their blogs.

Recently, like Archimedes’ eureka moment in the bath, I had one of those moments of clarity that are scarce in today’s complex world. Suddenly purpose, thriving and the role of HR all made sense to me and I was able to embrace some paradox . Here’s my attempt to articulate it: we can meet the needs of our organisations to be productive and performing. And our employees’ needs to be fulfilled and treated with dignity. And be fair to our suppliers and customers. And make sure future generations are protected. We just need to be purpose-led: guided behind a sustainable purpose and hold tensions rather than jumping to resolutions that trade one group off against another.

I’m not the first person to get here (maybe I’m even one of the last) and there are many organisations like Blueprint (that have developed principles and a framework to help business embrace the paradox), the BCorp Movement (for companies that meet high standards when it comes to social and environmental performance) now have over 2,000 companies certified in the UK. There’s also the Forward Institute (who focus on responsible leadership) and the Presencing Institute that go much deeper into this realisation.

Having escaped the training room some time ago, I’m now a leader of the HR profession and in a fairly senior role. I’m proud of our evolution as a profession and most days, to day that I’m in HR. But And I think we can evolve further to make a difference for organisations, employees and society, if we think more about getting employees thriving and connected with purpose .

I keep reading, but nowadays I’m also privileged to have opportunities to talk to the authors from time to time. Earlier this year, I had a conversation with Dawn Klinghoffer , Microsoft’s Head of Global Analytics about her Harvard Business Review article Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement.

Microsoft define thriving as “to be energised and empowered to do meaningful work”. You might have thought about other definitions or lenses. If you put thriving at work in to a search engine, you might get a report on helping better mental health or guidance on how to thrive in your career. If you put in organisation thriving, you might get one of the large consultancies telling you more about boosting organisations profits and impact.

Thriving takes place at different system levels. At a planetary level, if we are growing progress towards the global sustainability goals to have zero hunger, reduced inequalities and climate stability we could say that Earth is thriving. At a national level, if our young people have access to great education, our older generations are cared for with respect and dignity, and we’re all able to enjoy a picnic in a park every so often, these could be good indicators we’re thriving. At an organisational level, a government department delivering its outcome delivery plans and receiving high scores on its annual engagement survey could be good. And as we delve down to a team or individuals, we could look at if people are thriving in life with their health, prosperity and happiness. And/or Microsoft’s “to be energised and empowered to do meaningful work” definition. As this is a blog not a book, I’ll focus on employee thriving at work moving forward. Albeit, it’s important to spot the system level connections.

Coming back to the less philosophical world, let me tell you about one of the topics I discussed with Dawn in the context of employee thriving and the role of HR and leaders. We talked about hybrid working policy. Microsoft is a global tech company (as if you didn’t know – it owns LinkedIn where you’re likely reading this). Microsoft has plenty of money but that doesn’t mean it has a bottomless travel and subsistence budget. People with digital, data and technology skills are in demand by all organisations and there’s not enough of them to go around, so they need to make sure they can tap into wide geographical talent pools. Because they’re more mature in capturing workforce performance data they know when people need to come together (covered below). They also know that not having to commute and to be able to work from home helps employees be happier in life. And that lots of travel has a huge carbon footprint and isn’t creating a sustainable future for our planet.

They recognise the tensions and so have a flexible model where employees and teams are empowered to work remotely up to 50% of the time, have workplaces (offices) and locations that support the model, monitor/listen to what’s going on (through data of course) and then share insight on what works. Their insight being that teams should come together in person for ‘moments that matter’ which include when there’s a need to strengthen team cohesion, onboard people to a new role, team or company and when a new project kicks off. It’s a neat example of where with some systems thinking and embracing paradox, an employee policy has been designed to help the organisation achieve its profit goals and meet the needs of its people, society and the planet.

In our conversation we drew out the importance to considering and listening to employees holistically to work out the right conditions for them to thrive. For example, an employee early on in their career who feels under-utilised in their role might fill in a survey to say they have great work-life balance but tell us they don’t feel energised or inspired by the meaning and impact of what they are working on. By contrast, if that employee has a strong connection with purpose and is working on a large project that will make a positive difference to society, they might make a short-term trade-off on work-life balance to deliver it and still feel fulfilled and energised.

It’s over 80 years since Maslow came up with a hierarchy of needs. There are some basics we need to survive as a species, such as food and shelter. In an HR context, pay helps meet those needs and will motivate our people and help them to survive. But the more intense need we have, at the top of his pyramid, is a need for self-actualisation: we all need purpose and to have a sense of and fulfil a meaningful purpose. I believe HR and leaders must aid employees connect themselves and their work to their organisation’s purpose as just one of the conditions employees need to thrive.

In October, I’m getting together with a few hundred other HR leaders to explore the conditions employees need to thrive in more depth, and the role of HR in creating those conditions. I look forward to tapping into a hive mind of diverse perspectives and updating this article afterwards. And if you have your own thoughts on thriving and purpose, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.